Female Friendships Are More Crucial Than Ever—So Why Do We Still Love a Catfight?

A couple of years ago, I did something I hadn’t done since second grade: I had a birthday party and invited only women. I’d just moved into the apartment I’d bought on my own, and suddenly it hit me, in a way it hadn’t when I was busy applying for the mortgage and selecting a stove I would never use, that the space was totally mine. I’d never expected to live alone. I thought my track would be to go from splitting a place with roommates to sharing one with my husband. But now I was in a one-bedroom for which I’d handpicked every single item, down to the white plate that went over the intercom. It was like living in my own fingerprint. This transition felt special, and the more I thought about it, the more I wanted my friends to commemorate it with me.

A dozen women came over. I peeked at them in the living room while I was in the kitchen, and they looked so relaxed around my coffee table, talking to one another as easily as if they did this every Wednesday, even the ones who’d never met before. I thought, I love this. These women seemed as at home as I was.

Recently I remembered that night when I read that, while shooting Ocean’s 8, Sarah Paulson was asked if she thought there would be “actress infighting” among her seven costars. “Not in the slightest,” Paulson said. “I’ve never had anything like that happen on set.… It’s sort of sad, really, that that would be the expectation.” I’m pretty confident that Brad and George were never asked if they’d get in a tiff while making Ocean’s 11. So why is there still a widespread perception that a bunch of girls can’t all get together and be cool? Why doesn’t the world see what I saw that night in my apartment?

Catfights: An Abridged History

To find answers, I had to look only as far as pop culture. For decades, when TV shows or movies showed more than one woman in a room, we were in for some nasty conflict. In the fifties and sixties, the catfight—say, two women wrestling while wearing lingerie—was a staple of fetish films and low-budget B-movies. The legendary feud between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford made headlines at the same time the male bonding exemplified by the Rat Pack (which included Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., and Dean Martin) was near-universally celebrated.

Fast-forward to today, and the knee-jerk reaction to a group of women remains: If we don’t outright hate each other, we’re only pretending to get along. It even pops up in our everyday language. The term frenemies, for example, almost exclusively applies to women’s friendships. No matter how effusive women are about each other, outsiders—and sometimes the women themselves—often perceive a rivalry. This makes for women who appear to be nice to each other but don’t necessarily like each other, an idea that stems from two incompatible things we’re taught from childhood: We should be good girls, and if another woman gets something—an award, a promotion, or even a committed relationship—another one of us won’t.

Women are socialized to believe we can’t like and compete with one another at the same time. But thankfully, this is one trope that’s starting to end, as we see more depictions of female friendships, both fictionalized (think Hilary Duff and Sutton Foster’s coworker-friendship dynamic on Younger) and real, like that between tennis champions Serena Williams and Caroline Wozniacki. “It’s hard and lonely at the top,” Williams has said. “That’s why it’s so fun to have Caroline.”

Enter Girl Squads

Though #squadgoals is now a dusty hashtag, it marked a shift in how people view female friendship. Most popular in the back half of 2015, #squadgoals and #girlsquads applied to many groups, from a bunch of cute puppies to the Teletubbies, but mostly to women who were flashing peace signs on the beach, flanking a bride, or even showing up to support friends enduring genuine hardships, like treatment for cancer.

Taylor Swift’s squad, which included actresses Dakota Johnson and Hailee Steinfeld and models Gigi Hadid and Karlie Kloss, became legendary. Hadid once explained that their crew hoped to “inspire” other women “to be proud of the power you all have when you’re together, which can be amplified so much by each person…. We don’t want to be like other generations who are infamous for their cattiness. We want to be the new generation.” Their photos showed women chipping away at the old catfighting trope. Finally, some visual evidence that we could define our own friendships.

But Swift’s squad sparked some heated controversy for being all white and model perfect. (“Taylor Swift’s Girl Squad Is Actually Antifeminist,” one headline read.) Critics pointed out that such groups could be less about friendship and more about exclusion—the digital version of cliques, with the hashtag #squadgoals having the same effect as the Mean Girls line “You can’t sit with us.”

Friendships Unboxed

That Taylor takedown? It was largely about one photo on her Instagram feed, which also often includes women like Leslie Jones and Tiffany Haddish. I’d argue this incident shows just how much the world distrusts female friend packs. I get it: I had internalized the idea that women in groups are scary. When I stood outside of one in the middle school yard or sorority house lunchroom, I couldn’t see how I fit into one of these circles, and I didn’t know if I really wanted to. That’s why it’s so important to see depictions of our friendships in all their complex glory. Both onscreen and off, more nuanced images change the narrative that says women are, on some level, adversaries.

We’re comfortable seeing men compete and collaborate—just think of the countless examples of men doing business on the golf course—without ever questioning the validity of their friendships. Women often have to actively push against ideas about whether it’s even possible for us to mix business and pleasure. But when we do, we wipe away that distrust and make way for unimaginable possibilities.

It was a real-life friendship between Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon that jump-started the HBO series Big Little Lies. The two wanted to work together on a project focused on women and found the right one in Liane Moriarty’s novel. Onstage at the 2017 Emmys, Kidman said in her acceptance speech, “This is a friendship that then created opportunities.” That was true for them and the other women who worked on the show. And when we see women-run projects find success and win awards, it signals to the wider culture that there’s a need for these stories.

Phoebe Robinson has said she was tired of working with mostly white men in the comedy world. She wanted to see more women, people of color, and queer people. So when she met Jessica Williams while working at The Daily Show, they didn’t compete for more air time; they banded together to make something new. Their podcast, 2 Dope Queens, has been so successful that they’ll cohost four HBO specials this year—and, more important, they’re helping to bring more traditionally marginalized voices to the fore.

And of course the #MeToo movement shows what happens when women start from a position of believing one another. That support has allowed countless women to come forward and tell their stories, at work, to their loved ones, to the media. And then more than 300 powerful women like Shonda Rhimes, Octavia Spencer, and Natalie Portman came together to launch the Time’s Up coalition to help women in sectors including farming and housekeeping seek legal recourse for workplace harassment. The idea is to lift other women up, rather than believe that there’s room for only one woman at the top.

That bolstering can happen on a smaller scale too. When my friend Erica put one of my stories in her newsletter, she wasn’t worried that I somehow might outshine her; she was proud to share my unique point of view—which got the attention of my eventual book agent.

I’ve realized that my girlfriends give me what I always thought I got from men: strength and reliability. The respect I have for these women opened up a wider scope in my heart. No matter how vulnerable I might feel, they remind me that it’s going to be OK. They make me feel safe.

Kayleen Schaefer is a writer in New York City. This has been adapted from TEXT ME WHEN YOU GET HOME: The Evolution and Triumph of Modern Female Friendship by Kayleen Schaefer, to be published February 2018 by Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.